Whenever you need an enterprise class software, such as MS Exchange for you organization, you can either do the deployment in house or go to a service provider who offers to host it for you if you deploy it inhouse, then you'll need manpower, purchase, hardware servers, software license, and other costs like the power and cooling, maintenance, space in the server room, etc. But in case of the latter, you're not incurring any CapEx, just the OpEx.

The latter scenario is called SAAS (Software as a Service), which can be quite beneficial for emerprises in tough times. The software 'is hosted at some service provider's data center, and is accessed over the Internet us!ng a web browser. A lot of business applications are available as a service today, and it makes sense to explore them.

Alternately, an organization with enterprise-wide WAN links could also explore web-enabling many of its core business applications and provide them to users across all branches.

For instance, instead of having multiple databases sitting on servers in different branch offices, the organization could host the same centrally and provide access to it from a web browser. Or, instead of having thick clients installed for the core insurance application, an insurance company could host it centrally and provide browser based access to all branches. This would save the security, maintenance, and hardware costs incurred in data centers.

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Both scenarios would stress the organization's WAN links. So for this, WAN accelerators could be deployed at the SaaS provider's setup or in the enterprise data center. What's the benefit? Well, the service provider could target a wider range of users. For example, there is a growing set of users who access the Internet from their mobile phones using GPRS. Currently, GPRS doesn't provide very good bandwidth, which restricts its usage.

Hopefully things should improve with 3G getting launched, but nevertheless, if a
service provider could offer good applications over mobile phones using WAN accelerators, then more mobile users are likely to get hooked.

Likewise, an enterprise, could provide access to its applications to mobile users. Exchange for instance could be provided on mobile phones and the con¬nectivity could be enhanced using WAN accelerators. There are WAN accelerators that are specifically meant for mobile users.

They could work with or without a client. For example, you access a site over a bandwidth of 256 Kbps to backup some data which is around 200 MB. Now up¬loading at the given bandwidth will take whole lot of time, which is undesirable. So you will go for a higher bandwidth.

But if you are given a option where you pay x amount of extra charge to the web site (which is less than what you will be giving for double bandwidth), you get a accelerated bandwidth for uploading of data. Isn't that great for you as you don't need to pay double for extra bandwidth.